Anti-racist pledge
The bourgeois press has, for the past couple of weeks, been eagerly reporting the various controversies that have arisen regarding the anti-racism pledge drawn up by the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), which calls on politicians not to use the issue of race during the general election.
Firstly we must state that the pledge in itself is somewhat farcical – demanding that Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat politicians assure the electorate of Britain that they are not racist is like demanding that George W. Bush assure US voters of his commitment to the principles of Marxism-Leninism! These parties are capitalist parties, imperialist parties, and are
by their very nature
racist. They all support racist immigration laws; they all take part in the pushing of stereotypes about blacks and immigrants. For as Malcolm X correctly stated,
“Capitalism is impossible without racism”
– without disuniting workers on the basis of race, and attempting to substitute class antagonism with race antagonism, capitalism would lose a valuable tool for its defence. The Labour Party committing in words to not being racist does not change the fact that they
are
racist, any more than does the Flat Earth Society claiming that the Earth is flat make it true.
The ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’
New Labour, despite their atrocious record on race, despite their provocative media assault on ‘bogus asylum-seekers’, have been very careful to sign on the dotted line, making them very much the good guys in the eyes of the voters (particularly the middle-class politically-correct lobby). In fact, this writer suspects that the pledge, drawn up by the pro-Labour CRE, was designed specifically to do just that – to cover up Labour’s more ‘subtle’ racism and to expose the Tories’ rather more patently obvious bigotry. Robin Cook quickly jumped on the bandwagon, asserting the party’s ‘multiculturalist’ credentials, illustrating his argument by pointing to the status of chicken tikka masala as the country’s favourite meal. This statement was, of course, immediately branded as flippant and ridiculous. Doreen Lawrence, mother of the murdered Stephen Lawrence, has shown tremendous pluck and courage in standing up to racism in this country, and was among the first to denounce his speech, saying that it
“had a lot to do with the election”
and was
“not constructive”
. Cook, in trying to present himself as a multiculturalist, did little more than make himself look like an idiot. The British, not known traditionally for their culinary mastery, have naturally taken to alternatives when it comes to cuisine. Unfortunately however, many have failed to relate the food they enjoy to the people and culture from which it originates. It is like a US politician boasting of racial harmony in his country, using as evidence the fact that lots of white people are very fond of basketball (a sport which is dominated by blacks).
Mr Cook correctly stated that the British were not a race
“but a gathering of countless different races and communities, the vast majority of which were not indigenous to these islands”
. However, this being the case, why are Labour so deeply committed to laws which are designed to keep OUT countless different races and communities? Why have Labour taken the ‘tough stance’ that they have on immigration? Why do they give credence to the notion that immigrants are a central cause of society’s problems? If they are anti-racist, why have they not taken measures to stamp out racism? If Cuba, a country where before 1959 the black population were treated like animals, has been able to establish racial harmony; if the USSR was able to smash racism through education and through encouragement of minority cultures, why have Labour made no progress whatsoever in this direction? Because word is divorced from deed; statement from intention. They are an imperialist party, bound to further the causes of imperialism, and this necessarily implies promoting racial disunity and other divisions among the workers.
The Conservatives on the other hand are split on the issue of the pledge. Some have signed it for the sake of acceptability, but some of them, outright bigots as they are, have not been able to contain themselves. They know perfectly well that there are people out there who will vote for the candidate who denounces most noisily these terrible benefit-fraudsters who come over here in their droves underneath trains with the specific aim of bleeding dry the welfare system… Mr Hague has said that Britain will become a
“foreign land”
under Labour (although he has since attempted to justify this by saying that he meant it with regard to Europe), and various other Tory MPs have made some fairly startling claims such as that of East Yorkshire MP John Townend, who complained that immigrants were undermining this country’s
“homogenous Anglo-Saxon society”
. I don’t know what his views are on the undermining of, say, homogenous southern African society by the likes of Cecil Rhodes, but this kind of demagogy smacks very much of the 1960s Tory ‘if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’ campaigns.
All this is serving to make the Conservatives look very bad, which means New Labour can be portrayed in a positive light by the media. However, the main point I am trying to convey to the reader in this article is that the capitalist parties are as bad as each other. The intentions of the Labour Party are every bit as vicious as those of the Tories, they are just slightly better at cloaking their policies in respectability. Don’t be fooled!
The party in the forthcoming election which is taking a genuine and principled stance against racism is the Socialist Labour Party, a party which has proven anti-racist and anti-imperialist credentials, and which has no need to sign any pledge to corroborate those credentials. If you wish to use your vote to protest against racism, to protest against attacks on immigrants, to denounce imperialism and to call for socialism, vote SLP.